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Storagebod I was looking through the documentation for Mavericks - the next major Mac OS X release - to find out more about the tags and other extra metadata we'll soon be able to add to our files.

The feature was mentioned during the keynote at last week's Apple Worldwide Developer Conference in California. It made me wonder whether Cupertino will transition to a storage system that's more object-like; a technology that makes a lot of sense in my world of managing large numbers of bytes for a media company. It’d certainly give some of the application makers a decent kick in right direction.

And then, in my search, I came across this snippet which will upset some die-hard Mac fanbois, but will make some people who integrate Macs into corporate environments pretty happy. From the release notes:

SMB2:

SMB2 is the new default protocol for sharing files in OS X Mavericks. SMB2 is superfast, increases security, and improves Windows compatibility.

It seems Apple is finally beginning to deprecate AFP - the Apple Filing Protocol for sharing files over a network - and wholeheartedly embrace Microsoft's SMB2. Yes, I know some of us prefer NFS, but it is a step in the right direction. And Apple changing a default protocol to improve Windows compatibility, who’d have thunk it? Still, it appears that Apple are continuing with the horrible resource forks.

And the big storage vendors will be happy because they can finally say that they support the default network file system on Mac OS X.

And, no, I can’t see evidence for a whole-hearted embracing of object storage yet. ®